Book Image

Xamarin 4.x Cross-Platform Application Development - Third Edition

By : Peppers
Book Image

Xamarin 4.x Cross-Platform Application Development - Third Edition

By: Peppers

Overview of this book

Xamarin is a leading cross-platform application development tool used by top companies such as Coca-Cola, Honeywell, and Alaska Airlines to build apps. Version 4 features significant updates to the platform including the release of Xamarin.Forms 2.0 and improvements have been made to the iOS and Android designers. Xamarin was acquired by Microsoft so it is now a part of the Visual Studio family. This book will show you how to build applications for iOS, Android, and Windows. You will be walked through the process of creating an application that comes complete with a back-end web service and native features such as GPS location, camera, push notifications, and other core features. Additionally, you’ll learn how to use external libraries with Xamarin and Xamarin.Forms to create user interfaces. This book also provides instructions for Visual Studio and Windows. This edition has been updated with new screenshots and detailed steps to provide you with a holistic overview of the new features in Xamarin 4.
Table of Contents (13 chapters)

Preface

Xamarin has built great products for developing iOS and Android applications in C#: Xamarin Studio, an addin for Visual Studio, Xamarin.iOS, and Xamarin.Android. Xamarin gives you direct access to the native APIs on each platform and the flexibility of sharing C# code.  Using Xamarin and C#, you get better productivity when compared to Java or Objective-C, and still retain great performance compared to an HTML or JavaScript solution.

 In this book, we will develop a real-world sample application to demonstrate what you can do with Xamarin technologies, and build on core platform concepts for iOS and Android. We will also cover advanced topics such as push notifications, retrieving contacts, using the camera, and GPS location. With Xamarin 3, a new framework was introduced called Xamarin.Forms. We will cover the basics of Xamarin.Forms and how you can apply it to cross-platform development. Finally, we will walkthrough what it takes to submit your application to the Apple App Store and Google Play.